October 1 in LGBTQ History

1971: Connecticut becomes the second state (after Illinois in 1962) to decriminalize same-sex acts between consenting adults.

1982: Former Los Angeles Dodger outfielder Glenn Burke comes out in “Inside Sports”, becoming the first professional baseball player to do so.

1986: In his “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons”, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedictus XVI, clarifies the Church’s condemnation of the “homosexual inclination” as a “tendency toward an intrinsic moral evil” and an “objective disorder,” and criticizes Catholics who have been guilty of “an overly benign interpretation of the homosexual condition.”

1989: Denmark authorizes “registered partnerships” for lesbian and gay couples. The partnerships are considered similar to marriage, although they do not include rights to adoption, artificial insemination, or religious wedding ceremonies in state Lutheran Churches.

1993: A court orders the federal government of Canada to grant a gay federal worker spousal and bereavement benefits equal to those heterosexual employees receive.